This is not my beautiful home

The campsite table was dank when he opened the map of Australia to survey possibilities.

I hadn’t been able to warm my bones in four days, having agreed to pitch our tent in the forest-of-reluctant-sun, and not even my down jacket was doing the trick as I huddled over WA.

I was ready to throw darts at Pemberton.

“What about here?” my husband and partner in trans-continental tent travel gestured. I flinched. He may as well have spat on me.

“Not on your f*&%#g life. I’d rather die than go to Port Hedland,” I gagged. “It’s the ugliest town in the country.”Astute as the best of debating champions, he asked if I’d actually been there.

“No. But that’s beside the point. Did you know it’s caked in red dust?”

“But you’ve always called yourself a ‘Desert child’,” he smiled.

“And bogans?”

“You were born in Kalgoorlie,” he grinned. “Anyway, we’ve got to work somewhere - we’re nearly broke and it’s on our way around the country and you’ve never been there and –“

“You’ll never get me there.”“- and it’s hot.”

Oh. As in sun blasting, butter melting in your mouth and coconut oil melting your skin hot? He might have been 50 Shades of Christian Grey, he so had me then. Almost.

“But this tent we’ve lived in for so long, well, this is my beautiful home.”

“This is not your beautiful home, Elise,” he argued. “This is flywire with poles. You are cold. You cry. You want your mummy. You are poorer than the dirt beneath your mud blistered boots. And,” stabbing a wet hole through that part of the map north of the 26th parallel, “This could be your beautiful home,” he argued.

Compromise ensued within a fortnight. Although, one might argue that running out of money in Karratha, 240 kilometres south of Port Hedland, was more a fatality of poor maths than any sort of fair play.

He chose not to sign a month long work contract as we were still on our legendary roadtrip. Melbourne was six months ago, so we were half down, half to go, with the Kimberley, the top end, Queensland wilderness and Grafton still to see (a Cold Chisel thing there). All I could say was at least we hadn’t run out of money in Port bl#$@y Hedland.

Karratha, well, it kind of suited us. We had slept beneath stars for 25 weeks and frankly, I was over the Milky Way. We’d listened to road trains through walls flimsier than tissue paper. We’d drunk cask wine, God forbid. Here, however, was a town with amazing things like… a locum house with two bedrooms, shower, sagging roof (but a roof nonetheless), spinifex lawn, sink, table, crooked washing line, metal forks, solid walls and the piece de resistance…uncompromising sun.

This was my beautiful home.

Seven years later, Karratha wasn’t warm enough. So here we are in Port Hedland and I concede defeat.She may be ugly, but she’s hotter than Christian Grey topless in jeans.

Glen Slee

Elly

Have to agree that Port Hedland is not a place I would want to call home but like any place once you get there and settle in and discover the place and people abit more it slowly grows on you.
Stunning pic never would have guessed it was in PH!